BENGALURU: A recent study conducted by a US-based firm HfS Research predicts that the recent trends paving way for automation in the IT services industry will lead to heavy loss in job opportunities, close to 6.4 lakh. Reports suggest that at a global scale, the implication would result in a net decrease of 9 percent in headcount, or about 1.4 million jobs. Alongwith India, countries such as Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States will also join the charade. "We've already precisely pinpointed that 30% of routine, low-value positions are being phased out through automation over the next five years, far outweighing the expected new jobs being created in the medium-high skills areas," says Phil Fersht, CEO, HfS Research.

However, industry experts are pinpointing the other facet about this study, i.e. extensive automation will definitely lead to the creation of more job opportunities. The report quantifies the transforming job scenario in the next five years and further states that there will be a 30 percent fall in “low-skilled” jobs, while "medium-skilled" and “high-skilled” jobs will rise by 8 percent and 56 percent respectively. 

Sangeeta Gupta, Senior Vice President, NASSCOM states, “Nobody's really seen what automation and robotics will really lead to. There will be some impact of automation but overall we believe that technology adoption will actually lead to more job creation across sectors. Focus on talent increasingly has to be on skill and not scale. Jobs will exist in other places also; it's not fair to say these many jobs will get eliminated." 

The IT-BPO industry will face the direct consequence of incorporating automation as the industry is densely populated with an employee count of 3.7 million. People working in the BPO and infrastructure management space will be affected the most. "The BPO industry is going to be facing the problem of robotic process automation in the next two years. This is a challenge the industry and the country will face," comments Asheesh Mehra, CEO, Antworks.

The effect of automation can be observed already, as there was a drop of about 2000 employees in Tech Mahindra’s headcount owing to the sudden push towards automation, for the final quarter of the previous year. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) employing over 350,000 people also expressed their concern as their headcount addition had peaked at around 90,000 in FY16. This has prompted TCS and other IT companies such as Accenture to consider hiring less people in the upcoming years.

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